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Students all over are starting college this month, and some of them still have a nagging question: what, exactly, got me in? An admissions officer tells us the most wrongheaded things applicants try. And Michael Lewis has the incredible story of how a stolen library book got one man — Emir Kamenica — into his dream school. (Photo: Emir as a Harvard undergrad. Credit Terri Wang.)

Writer Michael Lewis tells the story of a man named Emir Kamenica, whose path to college
started with fleeing the war in Bosnia and becoming a refugee in the United States. Then he
had a stroke of luck: a student teacher read an essay he’d plagiarized from a book he’d
stolen from a library back in Bosnia, and was so impressed that she got him out of a bad high
school and into a much better one. He went on to Harvard and great success. Years later, he
tracks down the student teacher to thank her, only to find that she remembers the story differently. (34 minutes)College • Education • War